30
THE BISTI TRADING POST had burned years ago, with the thoroughness with which buildings burn when there is no fire department to interfere. The fire had left only the blackened stone foundation and odds and ends of melted glass and twisted metal. Years of casual Navajo scavengers had sorted through the ashes, and years of weather had piled tumbleweeds and dust against the ruins. The great cypresses imported to protect the post from the sun had long since starved for water, like town dogs abandoned in the desert. The row of bare dead trunks now served as an incongruous landmark for a ruin that had otherwise almost returned to nature.
Chee turned the pickup truck left beyond the dead trees, leaving a road marked “Graded Dirt” for a track his map did not show. It ran, fairly straight and fairly smooth, across an expanse of creosote brush.
“You sure this is the right way?” Mary asked.
“No,” Chee said, “but I’m sure it’s the right direction.”
“And you still think we can find the hogan? After all these years?”
“Probably,” Chee said. “She said nine miles northwest by north of the trading post, at the south side of an isolated butte. And she described the butte.” He pointed ahead. “That must be it. And out here they’d have had to build the hogan of stone, so it’s still there. It’s just a matter of hunting it. And I’m pretty good at hunting.” Chee paused, thinking about that statement. “Or I used to think I was.”
The land sloped downward now, into an immensity of erosion. What once had been a sandstone plain had been carved into a grotesquerie of shapes – tables, heads, layer cakes, twisted spires, exposed ribs, serrations, and weird forms that suggested things to which Chee’s imagination could not attach names. Wind and water had cut through the overlay into the blackness of coal deposits, into crimson clay, into the streaky blue of shale. Every color showed except green. This was the Bisti badlands. It stretched away for fifty miles under a sky in which clouds had been steadily building.
“I have a hunch he’s not dead,” Mary said. “I sort of sensed she was hiding something.”
“She was nervous,” Chee said. “Maybe she was lying and maybe there was another reason. But if the bones are there, we’ll find them. And if they’re not, we’ll find Tsossie.”
As he said it, his confidence surprised him. But he
One of the prayers from the Stalking Way ran through his mind, and the voice of his uncle chanting it:
Perfect understanding, Chee thought. Harmony between deer and man. Harmony between Jim Chee and Tsossie, or the bones of Tsossie, and the thinking of those who had placed Tsossie’s corpse among the rocks. But Jim Chee didn’t understand the thinking of whites. Neither Changing Woman nor Talking God had given him a song to produce that understanding. What would his uncle say to that? Chee knew exactly what the old man would say. He could almost hear him, because he had heard him so often:
“Boy, when you understand the big, you understand the little. First understand the big.”
And that would mean, in this case, that if Chee learned to understand all men (the big), he could understand white men (the little). His uncle would add that if a Navajo could find harmony with a deer, he could find equal harmony with a white man. Chee grimaced at the windshield. And then his uncle, who never failed to belabor a point, would add some wisdom about deer and men. He would say that the deer is much like the Navajo in fundamental ways. It loves its offspring and its mate, food, water, and its rest. And it hates cold, hunger, pain, and death. But the deer is also different. Its life is short. It builds no hogans. The Navajo is more like a white man than like a deer.
That’s about what his uncle would say, Chee thought sourly. But his uncle had no dealings with the whites when he could avoid them. And how would his uncle explain the thinking of a white man who filled his home with mementos of his achievements but kept his greatest honors hidden away in a keepsake box? The medals Tomas Charley had described were a Bronze Star and a Silver Star, which – as the military encyclopedia in the university library had informed him – are awarded for deeds of courage in combat; and the Purple Heart, awarded to those wounded in action. You would expect to find them framed in places of prominence on Vines’ wall, along with his other trophies. Why did he hide them away with a package of old boyhood photographs and a double handful of rock fragments? A Navajo might either advertise his exploits or modestly conceal them. Why would anyone hide some and advertise others?
The sky was darker now and the wind blew from the northwest. It gusted around the pickup, kicking up a flurry of sand and tumbleweeds.
“That has to be our butte,” Chee said. He pointed through the right side of the windshield. “It’s the only one within nine miles of the trading post. And it’s in the right direction.”
The track emerged on a great sheet of barren granite and skirted an island of overlaid sandstone. The island was capped by a slab of white limestone, which left a wide overhang where the softer rock had worn away. It suggested to Chee a table where giants dined. Suddenly, just beyond this landmark, he took his foot from the gas pedal and let the truck roll to a stop.
“What?” Mary asked.
Chee looked at her. “Boy,” he said. “Am I stupid.” He slammed his fist against the steering wheel. Two sets of keepsakes, he was thinking. One on the walls. One hidden in the safe. What was the difference between them? The difference was in time.
Mary was staring at him. “Come on,” she said. “Cut it out. Let me in on it.”
“I’m still getting it sorted out,” Chee said. “But what it boils down to is why a man who’s very much into keeping mementos and showing them off would hide the best of them in his wall safe.”
“Like those medals,” Mary said.
“Like those and his high school football team picture, and a couple of athletic awards.”
“And black rocks,” Mary said.
“Let’s get to those later. Stick to the easy stuff now.”
“Easy if you’ve thought of the answer,” Mary said. “Quit showing off, damn it. What have you thought of?”
